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IHeardItThroughTheGrapevine

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Gladys Knight & The Pips?

Side A

Popular music is a wonderful medium for distilling – or helping to create – a familiar phrase. Songwriter Barrett Strong was working in Chicago when one such phrase hit him hard. "I was walking down Michigan Avenue, and the idea just popped into my mind: ‘I heard it through the grapevine,’" he says. "I heard people say it all the time [but] nobody wrote a song about it. I sat at a piano and came up with the bass line. And the melody came back." Strong returned to Motown, where he began a long fruitful creative partnership with Norman Whitfield. "Norman said, ‘What do you have, man?’ I showed it to him. He said, ‘I’ll cut that!’" Whitfield did, for the Miracles, in August 1966. It sat in the can. He brought it to Marvin Gaye, who poured his heart out over a fresh and ominous minor-key arrangement, in January 1967. Whitfield’s instincts told him he had a smash on his hands. Yet during a heated Quality Control meeting, Berry Gordy overrode the room and chose H-D-H’s "Your Unchanging Love" as Gaye’s next single. "Grapevine" went back in the vault. Undaunted as usual, Whitfield tried another re-arrangement and turned to Gladys Knight & the Pips; they were about to release his "Everybody Needs Love." He approached them in the hallway at Hitsville. "I’ve got something I want you to hear," he said, mysteriously, leading them to the cubbyhole he shared with Strong. The writers produced a tape, grinning, as Gladys later put it, "like the cats who’d recorded the canary." "Why don’t you see what you can do with this?" Whitfield asked. Gladys and the Pips carried the tape off, treating it like the Hope diamond. "We took the track home, man," says the Pips’ Bubba Knight. "Norman gave us how the melody went – he couldn’t sing. Gladys picked up on that, and then we made up the backgrounds. We would rehearse that thing night and day, took it on the road with us until we molded it the way we wanted to. We went over to Motown and sung it for Norman over the tape he had given us. He said, ‘Good God! Get me a studio right now!’ "Smokey was in the studio at the time. Norman called up there and Smokey let us use the studio, man. They did a few moderations to it, changed it around a little bit, but basically took our whole background the way we had done it, and the lead the way that Gladys had done it." Gladys set Norman’s baby ablaze, her fire-and-brimstone lead and intricate call-andresponse with the Pips abetted by a drums-and-bass intro and Earl Van Dyke’s pounding piano. It became one of Motown’s top three records of 1967, and the Pips’ personal best with the company. Motown had several pressing plants working overtime to fill orders, resulting in at least two different mixes in the marketplace. (For drummers attempting to learn the beats, note that two drummers are on the track: Uriel Jones is playing the main rhythm while Benny Benjamin, whose health was deteriorating, is playing the cymbal accents and fills.) "It wasn’t just a record for us," Gladys wrote in her autobiography. "It was a work permit, and work came flowing our way. We moved right on up to the plum spots with chairs in the dressing rooms instead of stools or boxes." "Grapevine" was included on the Pips’ first album, Everybody Needs Love, issued the same month. The slower, doo-woppish "It’s Time To Go Now" became a jukebox favorite at closing time. It appeared on their second album, Feelin’ Bluesy, the following year.

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Side B

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